Assange Sentenced 50 Weeks For Bogus Bail Charge

Assange Sentenced 50 Weeks For Bogus Bail
Charge

Following seven years of imprisonment at the
Ecuadorian embassy fighting US extradition, WikiLeaks
founder Julian Assange has been sentenced to 50 weeks behind
bars for an entirely bogus bail charge.

Sky News
reporter Jordan Milne live-tweeted events as they unfolded,
reporting that Assange’s defense argued that his fears of
rendition and torture at the hands of the US government were
well-founded. His life in the Ecuadorian embassy and the
physical and psychological detriments which came with it
were described, including deteriorated health and
depression. The judge rejected his entire defense and
delivered nearly the harshest sentence possible.

“Your
continued residence in the Embassy has necessitated a
concentration of resources, and expenditure of £16 million
of taxpayers’ money in ensuring that when you did leave,
you were brought to justice,” Judge Deborah Taylor told Assange upon his sentencing.

This
is bullshit. Assange’s residency at the embassy never cost
taxpayers a penny; it was the British government’s
decision to pour money into patrolling the embassy around
the clock with police who had orders to arrest Assange on
sight over a petty bail charge. It was the British
government’s decision to persuade the Swedish government not to drop
its investigation in 2013 so that it could pursue the
agenda to arrest Assange for US extradition. Assange’s
residency didn’t cost British taxpayers anything; the
agenda to imprison and extradite a journalist for publishing
facts is what cost taxpayers £16 million. There is one
reason and one reason only that the British government saw
fit to spend £16 million of taxpayers’ money patrolling
that embassy, and it wasn’t because they really, really
hate bail violations.

No, the one and only reason the UK
government found it reasonable to invest £16 million in
patrolling the Ecuadorian embassy is because it had an
agenda to help the US war machine punish someone who
embarrassed it. And now the cost of that UK government
agenda is being used to justify nearly a year behind bars
after years of arbitrary
detention.

“Julian Assange’s sentence, for seeking
and receiving asylum, is twice as much as the sentencing
guidelines,” WikiLeaks tweeted. “The so-called speedboat
killer, convicted of manslaughter, was only sentenced to six
months for failing to appear in court.”

The bail charge
itself is entirely illegitimate. As scholar and WikiLeaks
advocate Simon Floth explains, under British law bail is only
legally breached if there’s a failure to meet bail
“without reasonable cause”, which the human right to
seek asylum certainly is. The UK itself was clearly
unconvinced of its own authority to charge someone who was
under political asylum for jumping bail, waiting a full nine
days before issuing an arrest warrant in 2012.

After the
Swedish government decided to drop its sexual assault
investigation in 2017 without issuing any charges,
Assange’s legal team attempted last year to get the
warrant dropped. The judge in that case, Emma Arbuthnot,
just happens to be married to former Tory
junior Defence Minister and government whip James Arbuthnot,
who served as director of Security
Intelligence Consultancy SC Strategy Ltd with a former head
of MI6. Arbuthnot denied Assange’s request with extreme
vitriol, despite his argument that British law does have
provisions which allow for the time he’d already served
under house arrest to count toward far more time than would
be served for violating bail.

The US charge accompanying Assange’s extradition
request is even more bogus than the bail charge; a
re-interpretation of standard journalistic practices like
source protection to create a charge which the Obama
administration declined to prosecute based on the same
evidence for fear of endangering press freedoms. Assange is
charged with “conspiring” to help Chelsea Manning avoid
detection while leaking evidence of US war crimes and
malfeasance, which is something any investigative journalist
who publishes leaks would do. The charge is a bunch of words
designed to twist standard journalistic practices into just
enough of a crime to get Assange onto US soil for
“non-political” reasons.

As Pentagon Papers lawyer
James Goodale explains, “Under the U.S.-U.K.
extradition treaty, one cannot be extradited from the United
Kingdom if the extradition is for ‘political
purposes.’” Once he’s on US soil, far more serious charges may be added
that are of a very political nature indeed. If that happens,
Assange will not be spending the five years behind bars for
computer offenses that his current charge allows, he’ll be
spending decades.

“I don’t think Julian is looking at
five years in prison, I think he’s probably looking at 50
years in prison,” said CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou,
adding, “I think that there are many more charges to be
considered for Julian. I would expect a superseding
indictment, possibly to include espionage
charges.”

There is simply no such thing as a fair
national security trial in the Eastern District of Virginia,
which is where Assange will be heading if extradited to the
US.

“No national security defendant has ever won a case
in the EDVA,” Kiriakou told RT upon Assange’s arrest. “In
my case, I asked Judge Brinkema to declassify 70 documents
that I needed to defend myself. She denied all 70 documents.
And so I had literally no defense for myself and was forced
to take a plea.”

“He will not, he cannot get a fair
trial,” Kiriakou said on a Unity4J vigil when Assange was
still at the embassy. “It’s impossible, because the deck
is stacked. And everybody knows what’s gonna happen if he
comes back to the Eastern District of Virginia. This is the
same advice I gave Ed Snowden: don’t come home, because
you can’t get a fair trial here. Julian doesn’t have the
choice, and that’s what frightens me even more.”

This
is why it’s imperative for everyone who stands for truth,
press freedoms or government accountability to oppose this
extradition request tooth and claw, wherever they’re at in
the world. Australians should be pushing their government to
intercede against US extradition, Britons should be doing
the same, and Americans should be pushing their government
not to extradite. It’s too late to keep Assange from being
pried loose from the embassy and imprisoned by the UK, so
now we need to put all our energy into keeping Assange out
of the clutches of the same government which tortured Chelsea Manning.

Go to
demonstrations, make phone calls to your local
representatives, donate get posters spread around
Australia, write letters to the editor, and share
information about what’s going on with your friends and
family and anyone you can. We can’t rely on the legal
system to sort this one out, because, as we’ve seen today,
the legal system can very easily be manipulated to serve the
interests of the
powerful.

Caitlin Johnstone is a 100 percent crowdfunded rogue journalist, bogan socialist, anarcho-psychonaut, guerilla poet and utopia prepper living in Australia with her American husband and two kids. She writes about politics, economics, media, feminism and the nature of consciousness. She is the author of the illustrated poetry book "Woke: A Field Guide For Utopia Preppers."

ALSO:

In the circumstances, yesterday’s move by Lam to scrap – rather than merely suspend – the hated extradition law that first triggered the protests three months ago, seems like the least she can do. It may also be too little, too late. More>>

The DOC-led draft Biodiversity Strategy seeks a “shared vision.” But there are more values and views around wildlife than there are species. How can we hope to agree on the shape of Aotearoa’s future biota? More>>

We are in a moment of existential peril, with interconnected climate and biodiversity crises converging on a global scale to drive most life on Earth to the brink of extinction… These massive challenges can, however, be reframed as a once in a lifetime opportunity to fundamentally change how humanity relates to nature and to each other. Read on The Dig>>